A few years ago I visited Poland with my brother. On a side trip from Krakow we took a bus trip to see the horrific concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau. (See link below).
Estimates are that 6,000,000 human beings were murdered in these camps. Some , however,survived.
Boryus was one of those survivors. He had survived Buchenwald. He had survived Peenemunde. He had survived Dora. He had survived Bergen-Belsen.
In 2012 Boryus Romanchenko attended a special ceremony celebrating the liberation of Buchenwald. He spoke about the need to create a world where peace and freedom will thrive. An old man who had survived the mot vile political movement designed by man, Naziism.
In 2018 Boryus attended another ceremony at Buchenwald. He was one of the last 3 living survivors of the camp. The last living links to the horror foisted on human beings by the mad man, Hitler.
Boryus was living peacefully in his apartment in Kharkiv, Ukraine, when it was targeted by the Russian attack. A civilian target. An apartment building.
Boryus survived Hitler. Himmler. Goebels.
Boryus lived for 77 years after his liberation. He thought he had survived the worst.
But Boryus Romanchenko, at the age of 96, could not survive Putin.
It is the particulars—the individual stories—that break through the numbness wrought by witnessing this growing atrocity. Boryus now joins the family mown down while fleeing and the pregnant woman who died, with her baby, as the indelible faces of Putin’s deliberate decimation of civilians.
He sure has secured his place in the history books: as a weak, sniveling coward of unfathomable evil who wrought havoc on untold numbers of innocents in the land he attacked, his own country, and an ever-widening area where hunger and homelessness are spreading.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Yes, it is easy to forget that the idea of “mass murder” can distort the reality of all the individual murders that encompasses.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Boryus Romanchenko could not survive Putin. Now it’s time to ask, Can the world survive Putin?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Saw this today… very sad
LikeLiked by 3 people
The Russian vehicles use the letter ‘Z’ for identification. Overlay that Z with another at a 90-degree angle and see what you get. History does indeed repeat itself.
LikeLiked by 5 people